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Thursday, October 9, 2014

Linking CX Strategy to Corporate Strategy & Brand Values

How do you link your customer experience strategy with your corporate strategy?

As many of you know, earlier this week we celebrated the second annual CX Day, a day to celebrate both customers and the professionals who work tirelessly to improve the customer experience.

I helped kick off the celebrations by hosting a panel of customer experience experts in the first Google Hangout of the day for Australia. Panelists included Cyrus Allen (Partner, Strativity Group), Brian Andrews (consultant and formerly with Intuit), and Karyn Furstmann (VP of Customer Experience, Safeco Insurance).

The discussion was focused on linking customer experience strategy to corporate strategy and brand values, and there are some great nuggets in this Hangout that I thought would be valuable to share here, in case you missed it.

A critical component of business success is the development of a customer experience strategy that articulates a clear vision of the experience that a company seeks to create in support of the company's brand values, including its direct linkage to CX activities, resources, and investments.

With that, the format of the discussion was to cover some "starter" topics for those who are early in the stages of their customer experience journey and needed some basic "how-tos" to get started, followed by some more advanced questions for those who are well underway and might want to energize their current efforts. The questions I posed were:

Starting Out with Your CX Strategy
How do you develop a customer experience strategy?
What are the components of a solid strategy?
Who defines the intended customer experience?
How do we ensure that it supports and aligns with the brand values?

Energizing Your CX Strategy
How do we get the organization to support the strategy?
What does success look like? How do we measure it?
What does that direct linkage entail? To which activities, resources, and investments?

About CX Journey Inc.

CX Journey Inc. is a consulting firm specializing in laying the groundwork required to establish a CX strategy that will drive your culture transformation efforts. Our beliefs are that (1) customer understanding along the customer experience journey is key to developing a strategy that allows both customers and businesses to achieve their desired outcomes, and (2) the employee experience cannot be an afterthought.

Why CX Journey™?

You know the quote, "Success is a journey, not a destination." Well, the customer experience is a journey, too. It's a never-ending journey. Once you've designed the best experience for customers today, their needs change, their expectations evolve, customers change, etc. You'll need to think about the experience today and listen for - and anticipate - what lies ahead. You must always strive to deliver that ultimate customer experience, not only at a single touchpoint but also - especially - along the entire journey. Have you taken the first step?

"Knowing where you're going is the first step to get there." -Ken Blanchard

"It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end." - Hemingway